OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Solid State Drive Review

IOMeter

IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.

IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are:

• Transfer Request Size
• Percent Random/Sequential distribution.
• Percent Read/Write Distribution
• Aligned I/O’s.
• Reply Size
• TCP/IP status
• Burstiness.

Unconditioned Read / Write

Conditioned Read / Write

Following a set of up and down results, the IOPs rating of the 460 is strikingly different to the trends that we have seen from other SSDs in the past. On the read front, the levels rise on the new drive along a steady line whilst the conditioned figures stay consistent dropping off a little at the 75% full test.

The write speeds though are totally different. On the fresh drive, the performance lowers a little as the volume fills up, whilst the conditioned drive sees a strong consistent rise in performance. Whilst the lines above may show some strong positive and negative lines of IOPs performance, I will make a point in noting that the difference between the highest and lowest figures recorded overall is only 644 IOPs. On one hand this means that the drive is not suffering from any IOPs performance degradation at all, but it means that out of the box it appears that the drive is giving all it has got with the rise that we typically see not present.

Drive Comparison

For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill.

Due to the fact that the 460 did not see any rise in IOPs performance after the conditioning phase, the 450 sits above it in the charts whilst the now comer sits perfectly in the middle of everything that we’ve recorded to date.